Writing Slavic in the Arabic Script: Literacy and Multilingualism in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire

Abstract

Envisaged as a contribution to the early modern Ottoman social and intellectual history, this dissertation focuses on the region of the Ottoman-ruled South-Slavic Europe in the period between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries and investigates how imperial language ideologies and communicative practices embedded in the written word radiated back and forth among Ottoman provinces and regions. The discussion in this dissertation is centered on the texts written in South-Slavic language/s by the use of the Arabic script and the ideas that informed their production and reproduction. Some of these texts have been studied by the primarily ex-Yugoslav philologists and linguists as belonging to the so-called Slavic/Bosnian aljamiado literature which emerged in the early seventeenth century and stopped being productive in the early twentieth century. This study seeks to show that this textual corpus was larger than the received wisdom leads us think and that it was not just a product of non-elite Muslim literati of Slavic/Bosnian origin as previous interpreters have argued. The Slavic aljamiado—here reconceptualized as Slavophone Arabographia—was reflective of the various trajectories of the incorporation of South-Slavic Europe into the Ottoman imperial structure, on the one hand, and historical change of the position of Slavic language and its speakers within the Ottoman multilingual regime, on the other hand. Arguing that a relative marginality of Slavophone Arabographia within the Ottoman media ecosystem did not imply its ideological insignificance, this dissertation investigates the instances of Slavic written in the Arabic script as windows into how various individuals and groups navigated a hierarchical, and changing social order in one of the densest linguistic and cultural contact zones of the early modern world. The Ottoman Slavophone Arabographia, this dissertation suggests, is an excellent case for investigation of the relationship between language and power in the context of the early modern Ottoman empire, as well as other, comparable contexts. Last but not least, it forces us to rethink contemporary—and ahistorical—conceptions of language, culture and script that are often uncritically used by modern historians.